Angelo Riva

What Financiers Usually Do, and What We Can Learn from History

Abstract This paper aims at presenting an historical perspective on some of the major questions raised by Hyman Minsky and his recent followers, in particular about the instability of banking practices and the diffusion of the “originate and distribute” model under the domination of securities markets. We will argue that, when dealing with these issues, one must take great care at distinguishing what is actually new and what is recurrent. Financial innovation is nothing new. Risk taking through financial innovation is not new either. Banks have been innovating constantly over the last centuries, and many of their practices that we consider as “traditional” have not always been so, and result from a long process involving trials and errors, each error usually resulting in excessive risk-taking and waves of failures. We point out that markets have survived these crises when they have been able to organize and build the institutional structure allowing the various interests involved to become consistent with each other.

Trading forward: The Paris Bourse in the nineteenth century

Abstract Contrary to what law and finance theory would predict, the Paris Bourse was highly liquid at the turn of the twentieth century: the traded volumes amounted to four times the French GDP. This magnitude was mainly due to forward trading. The Bourse had developed as a forward market, despite a ban on forward transactions. The guild-like body running the Bourse played a key role in legitimizing and legalizing these operations, previously equated with gambling. The 1885 legalizing act initiated a new field of law (‘securities law’) and paved the way for the heyday of the Paris Bourse.

Market Information as a Public Good: The Political Economy of the Revision of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID)

The crisis triggered by the US mortgage market meltdown in summer 2007 initially forced governments with a deep-seated belief in deregulated markets to do what they had repeatedly said they never could or would do again: namely to take stakes in financial institutions, suspend certain transactions deemed to be speculative and manipulate their currencies. Once the emergency was over, they said, they would take measures to put credit institutions and the financial system – currencies, banks and markets – back on a sound footing.